Skeletons, p.4
Skeletons, page 4
They were the first to arrive and, as usual, they all fell into their assigned roles. Charles handed round the gin and tonics. Jen followed Amelia to the kitchen and did whatever she could see needed doing, while Jason caught up with his dad in the living room. It was a masterclass in gender stereotyping and one that, Jen knew full well, like most women of her generation, she would scorn under any other circumstances. She had tried on occasion, though, to accept Amelia’s protests that she didn’t need help, and to sit and chat with the rest of the family in the hour before they ate, but she hadn’t been able to resist the smells and the warmth and the acceptance of Amelia’s kitchen.
So, on Masterson Sundays, she allowed herself to indulge her inner unreconstructed 1970s woman. When Poppy and Jessie arrived, they would laugh at her, as they always did, happy to let Amelia do what she loved to do and only offering up the minimum of assistance.
‘So how’s it been?’ Amelia asked as she whisked flour into the gravy.
Jen knew immediately what she was referring to.
She had thought that Simone leaving home, two years earlier, would have gone some way to preparing her for the time when she and Jason would be left on their own. But, although she had missed her desperately – could almost feel her absence as a presence, somehow, like a black hole, a vortex in the middle of their house – it was nothing compared to now. She had still had one child at home. She had still had a purpose, an identity. She’d comforted herself by transferring all her attention to her younger daughter, shoved her head down into the sand and refused to look to the future, stubbornly failing to make any long-term plans. To be fair, Jason had reacted in exactly the same way, and they had never really discussed what might come later.
Jen and Jason had always known Simone wouldn’t be an only child. In fact, once she had found out she was pregnant, Jen had been adamant that their offspring would never have the lonely upbringing she herself had endured, and Jason had readily acquiesced. Emily had come along eighteen months later, before either of them could change their minds. If she hadn’t, Jen often said, they would have tried IVF, adoption, kidnapping, anything. Got a dog and put a dress on it, if all else had failed.
They’d decided very swiftly, though, that while one might be bad, three would have been way too much of a good thing. Two, in this instance, was the magic number.
Amelia totally understood the void that Emily’s departure would have left. They had talked about it often in the weeks that had led up to her going. Amelia had been through it herself, of course, although after drama school Jessie had moved back home without a second thought and happily fallen back into the role of dependent daughter, allowing her mother to cook for her and do her washing. Even though Jen had always thought they should throw her back out, make her understand what it was like to have to fend for herself, she was now secretly harbouring hopes that in three years’ time Emily might do the same.
‘Pretty awful. Although I’m not sure it’s quite sunk in yet. I keep waiting for her to walk through the front door.’
‘You’ll get used to it. And these days they seem to keep in touch much more regularly than they used to. Mobile phones, I suppose.’
‘She’s called me every day,’ Jen said, and made an apologetic face as if to say, ‘I really don’t have anything to complain about.’
‘Well, there you go. Although don’t expect that to last. Once she settles in, gets into the swing of it –’
‘I know. Then it’ll be me phoning her.’
Amelia leaned over and gave her a hug. ‘Like I said, you’ll get used to it.’
‘Jason is pretending he’s fine about it, but I know he’s checking her Facebook status every thirty seconds.’
Amelia smiled. ‘I remember Charles kept making excuses to visit his Highgate branch when Poppy first went to St Martins, and she was living in Hackney. And then he’d say, “Well, as I was over that side of town anyway, I thought I might as well keep going and visit her.” In the end, she had to ask him to call first because he was cramping her style.’
‘Are you talking about me?’ Charles appeared at the door, fresh drinks in hand. Whoever hadn’t volunteered for driving duty was always half-cut by the time lunchtime was over.
Charles looked, as he always looked, ready for his close-up. Jen had never seen him anything other than tanned, shaved and smelling of Molton Brown shower gel and Geo. F. Trumper cologne. (She had no idea how he kept up the tan in rainy London. Regular sprays in a St Tropez booth, maybe. She found it hard to imagine him in the regulation paper thong, lifting one leg and then the other while a barely-out-of-her-teens girl squirted brown liquid over his inner thighs). Even when she and Jason had stayed at the house, or they had all gone away for a weekend together, it had been the same. Any time of the day or night. He was like one of those women who are so afraid of their partners seeing them without make-up that they sleep in their full slap, lying motionless on their backs all night in the hope of not smudging their mascara, and then set the alarm for half an hour before their husband gets up so they can cleanse and reapply the whole lot while he’s still snoring.
Jen had always admired the fact that Charles made such an effort, even if he sometimes did get it a bit wrong: his hair a touch too big, his tan a shade too orange, his heels verging a little too close to Cuban. It was sweet. Endearing. Lovable.
‘Now, why would you think that?’ Amelia said.
‘Lucky guess,’ he said, and planted a kiss on the top of each of their heads as he handed them new glasses and took the empty ones to the sink to rinse out.
‘You should be so lucky,’ Amelia said, twinkling at Jen as she teased him. ‘Charles always thinks everyone’s talking about him. Not because he’s paranoid, but because he thinks he’s the most interesting topic there is, isn’t that right, dear?’
Charles looked mock horrified. ‘See what I have to put up with, Jen? My own wife –’
‘Oh, get out the violins,’ Amelia said.
Charles sidled up behind her and wrapped his arms round her, squeezing tight. ‘You know you love me, really.’
‘Maybe,’ Amelia said, coquettishly.
Charles squeezed more tightly.
‘OK, yes, I do, now get off me.’ She batted him away with a tea towel.
‘See …’ Charles smiled a victorious smile at Jen as he went to leave the kitchen again with the two clean glasses – Sundays were always a relay of clean and dirty glasses for Charles. It never seemed to occur to him that he could just refill the ones each of them had already used. ‘I’m irresistible.’
The front door banged, announcing the arrival of Poppy and Maisie, closely followed by a heavily first-time pregnant Jessie, and Martin. Coats were dumped on the backs of chairs, more gin and tonics appeared. Jessie and Martin joined Jason and Charles in the living room while Poppy slumped at the kitchen table. Amelia had set paints and paper out for Maisie, and she gravitated towards them like an addict to a rock of crack.
‘She’s definitely a Masterson,’ Amelia said approvingly.
Jessie heaved herself into the room. On her still skinny frame her seven-month baby bump made her look like she was attempting to smuggle a spacehopper through customs. She held on to her lower back and moaned theatrically.
‘They’re all discussing cars in there. It’s like an episode of bloody Top Gear.’
‘Aaah, is no one talking about you?’ Poppy smiled a sarcastic smile.
Jen stifled a laugh. Jessie-baiting was one of Poppy’s favourite pastimes. It was almost too easy.
‘Mum …’ Jessie whined. Exactly, Jen imagined, as she would have when she and Poppy were ten and thirteen.
Amelia put a glass of apple juice down in front of her. ‘She’s only teasing.’
Jen stepped in. ‘How are you feeling, Jess? She kicking much yet?’
Jessie and Martin had opted not to find out the sex of their baby, but the rest of the family was just assuming it would be a girl. The Mastersons specialized in having girls. Jason, they all agreed, had been an anomaly. The only boy of his, or the next, generation among the whole extended clan.
Jessie turned to Jen, happy that she was the main topic again. ‘Like crazy. I think she – or he, obviously – is going to be a dancer. I’ve been doing this pregnancy yoga and I swear the baby tries to join in –’
‘She’s probably just attention seeking. I wonder who she takes after?’ Poppy chipped in.
‘I’m not even listening to you.’ Jessie held up her hand. ‘It’s like you don’t exist.’
If she ignored the way they had all aged, Jen could have believed she was back in the early 1990s. The arguments were the same, the decor had barely changed – except for a few coats of the same colour paint, which had all then been completely recovered with the same old artwork. Even Jason’s misshapen pot still held pens in the middle of the table. She wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
‘What else can I do?’ she said, putting her arms round her mother-in-law from behind as she stood at the stove.
‘Nothing.’ Amelia lifted up one of Jen’s hands, and kissed it. ‘Sit down and enjoy yourself.’
At lunch Charles liked to rehash old family in-jokes. When he took his first mouthful of lamb, he clutched his throat dramatically, like he always did, and pretended to keel over in a death throe.
‘Charles, stop it,’ Amelia said, smiling.
Charles, as always, sat up with a triumphant look on his face. ‘Just kidding. It’s delicious.’
He took another bite. Did it again. Maisie squealed hysterically, exactly as Simone and Emily used to when they were little. The more times he did it, the funnier she thought it was.
Then the reminiscences started. Just as in all families, the old well-worn anecdotes would be aired again and again, with everyone chipping in to add their favourite parts. Typically Amelia or Charles would run through the time Jason got his thumb stuck in a bottle of ketchup and had to go to Casualty, the time Jessie made a snowman and brought it inside and hid it under her bed, not realizing it would melt all over the floor, and the time Charles drove the car to Battersea with Poppy’s favourite bear and the house keys on the roof.
‘And they were still there when he arrived!’ Amelia would say. Then everyone would join her in the next sentence. ‘All the way from Twickenham to Battersea.’
And then they would start on stories that included Jen, so she didn’t feel left out. The time they had all gone away for the weekend and Jen had cooked a chicken with the giblets still tucked up in their plastic bag inside, the time she’d offered fifty pence to what she thought was a tramp only for it to turn out to be one of Charles and Amelia’s wealthy bohemian neighbours enjoying a short rest on a park bench.
There were countless running gags in the Masterson family. Not to mention rituals and traditions. Tangible evidence of a shared happy past. They were incomprehensible to the outside world and, no doubt, rather self-indulgent and annoying to those not involved. A little bit ‘Aren’t we great?’, a touch ‘Do you see how close we must be?’, a smidgen ‘We’re very pleased with ourselves!’.
As for Jen, they made her feel warm and fuzzy. Included. Loved.
Then Charles would toast Amelia and thank her for the meal, as he always did. They would all clink glasses, echoing his thanks and secretly congratulating themselves on how fortunate they were.
‘I hope we’re like them when we’ve been married for forty-five years,’ Jen said to Jason in the car on the way home, not for the first time.
‘What? Me making the same old jokes and you still laughing?’
‘Exactly. It’s so sweet.’
‘Well,’ Jason said, reaching out and putting a hand on her knee. ‘I can certainly keep to my end of the bargain. It’s you who’ll have the hard job of pretending you still find me funny.’
‘I’ve already got away with it for twenty-two,’ Jen said, laughing. ‘What’s the difference?’
8
For Charles and Amelia’s upcoming forty-fifth wedding anniversary Jen and Jason had organized a few days away near Oxford for the four of them. That is, Jen had done all the organizing and Jason had cheered her on from the sidelines. They had wanted to get the whole clan down there, but it had proved impossible to pin down dates they could all do, so they were having a family party the following weekend too. Simone and Emily had already booked their train tickets home for that one.
In a moment of madness Jen had come up with the idea of making a DVD as a present for her in-laws. A document of the whole extended family sharing memories and mementos. As soon as she’d suggested it, she had been overwhelmed by the practicalities of making it happen – until Jessie, surprisingly, had offered to drive across the country to the various aunts and uncles and cousins, recording their messages on her camcorder and trawling through their old family photos. That was the thing about Jessie. She could be infuriatingly selfish and thoughtless at times, but then out of nowhere she would do something so incredibly generous or kind that everything else would be forgotten.
‘You and Poppy have work,’ she’d said, when she’d called Jen to suggest her plan. ‘And this is probably the last time I’ll be of any use to anyone before the baby comes and I’m out of action for God knows how long.’
‘I’m sure we can just ask them to record something on their phones and email it to us,’ Jen had said.
‘No way. If we’re going to do it, we need to do it properly. Plus it’ll give me an excuse to get away while Martin decorates the nursery.’
Meanwhile, Jen had arranged to spend an evening round at Poppy’s, making a list of everyone who should be included and emailing them to let them know what was required.
‘So I’ve got a date,’ Poppy said, as soon as Maisie had been tucked up in bed and the wine opened. They had got as far as writing down the names of all Charles and Amelia’s siblings before they got sidetracked. A job that had taken them approximately one and a half minutes.
Poppy’s announcement, in itself, wasn’t really news. Poppy often went on dates. First dates, second dates, third dates. A few times she had seen someone for a couple of weeks, or even months, before either she or he – usually she, it seemed to Jen – decided they could do better. Jen had always found her sister-in-law’s tales of single life both entertaining and alarming. Her relationships always came with bucketfuls of added drama. She had a predilection for complicated men – ones with addictions and neuroses and, occasionally, although she never found out until it was too late, wives. It was a constant whirl of fights, tears and extravagant make-ups in Poppy’s world. Jen couldn’t see the attraction herself.
‘Good for you. Who is he?’
‘Well, his name’s Ryan, he’s forty-two, separated, soon to be divorced, two children – eleven and nine – that he has at the weekends, and he runs his own company. Importing furniture from the Far East.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
Poppy paused just long enough for Jen to start to wonder what was going to come next.
‘Well … OK, I’m just going to tell you and then you can laugh in my face.’
‘Poppy! What?’
‘You have to promise not to tell the others first.’
‘Of course.’
‘I met him online, all right? I signed up with one of those dating sites. So. Now you know.’
Jen realized she was sitting there open-mouthed. She couldn’t have been more surprised if Poppy had told her she’d met this man at a Christian prayer meeting, or a stamp-collecting convention.
‘You’ve been online dating, and you didn’t tell me?’
‘I’m telling you now, aren’t I? He’s the first one I’m meeting.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I knew you’d just say the only people on there would be saddos or rapists. Or both.’
‘Well, actually, I wouldn’t, because you’re on there now, and you’re not a saddo. Or a rapist. Honestly, I think it’s a good idea.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. It’s the only way anyone seems to meet anyone these days, according to the papers.’
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t the truth. Jen actually did feel quite alarmed that Poppy would look for her future among the kind of people who, she imagined, would put themselves out there, on the internet. Drop-dead gorgeous Poppy, with her line in smart put-downs and the way she could fill a room just by smiling. She had always been the crush object of all the cool blokes – the desirable, moody ones. Did she really need to advertise for a date?
‘You don’t think it makes me look desperate?’
‘No more than usual.’
‘Gosh, you’re funny.’
‘I know. I can’t help myself. Seriously, though, even though I don’t think it’s sad at all, be careful. Promise me you’ll meet him in a public place and you’ll tell me exactly where you’re going to be and when. Just in case.’
‘I’m not stupid. We’re having lunch on Wednesday at the Soho Hotel. And I’ve already told him that, if we get on, I want to talk to either his ex-wife or his mother before we go out on a proper date, to check he’s really who he says he is. I’m not taking the risk he’s happily married and just wants a bit on the side.’
‘And he said OK?’
‘Yep. And I’ve already checked out his company’s website, and it all seems to be above board. His name is on there and they have a warehouse in Acton. I phoned up and asked about ordering a sideboard, and it seemed like they’d have been happy to deliver one to me if I’d said I wanted it.’
